


(oh, you'll probably go to heaven) please don't hang your head & cry

by SafelyCapricious



Series: ain't no grave can hold my body down [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, BAMF Haruno Sakura, F/M, Kind of Time Travel kind of Not, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26782816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: There’s no such thing as a good death.But Sakura faces her death without any regrets. Her dying is keeping her precious people safe — and that’s all she can ask for.So she dies with a smile, taking thousands of enemies with her.She wakes up and falls off the branch she’s laying on.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Itachi, PRE SHIP - Relationship
Series: ain't no grave can hold my body down [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950148
Comments: 51
Kudos: 556





	(oh, you'll probably go to heaven) please don't hang your head & cry

**Author's Note:**

> Title from I Can't Decide by the Scissor Sisters because it's kinda messed up message and jaunty tune seems like a good fit for this story.
> 
> There are some extra notes that might contain spoil-y bits at the end notes, if you want to check there first. 
> 
> Otherwise, this is day two of Fictober! Going with "Broken" here. 
> 
> Also, this is going to be shippy for Sakura/Itachi and this is the first part of a series, so there will definitely be more (and it might even be posted this month!) 
> 
> Oh, also, I generally have a 'I only take the parts of canon I think are interesting' attitude about Naruto, so expect that.
> 
> Shoutout to the Haruno Sakura Discord Server and all their enabling. You guys are the best.
> 
> That's all. 
> 
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

There’s no such thing as a good death.

But Sakura faces her death without any regrets. Her dying is keeping her precious people safe — and that’s all she can ask for.

So she dies with a smile, taking thousands of enemies with her.

She wakes up and falls off the branch she’s laying on.

Landing on her feet, even though the last thing she remembers involved both of her legs being broken, and also ripped away from her, is instinctive and easy. Being on the ground feels too open, however, and in a moment she’s perched back in the tree. Her pack is there, and clean, and _full._ So she sits and she tries to think when someone could’ve put her into a genjutsu.

She eats, while she thinks, because she’s still fairly sure she’s dead but if she’s not she needs her strength and it’s been a while since she’s eaten anything but soldier pills, raw meat, bugs or ash.

The ration bars taste good to her, now, and she doesn’t dwell on that even as she expects them to turn into maggots or something at any point, if she is in a genjutsu. Not that them turning into maggots would really stop her — good protein in them, and she’d gotten oddly fond of them out of necessity.

She finishes three ration bars and drinks water from her canteen that doesn’t taste like ash. Her chakra spikes, which she’s been sending every few seconds, into her own brain and nervous system haven’t so much as made the world around her waver, and she’s starting to have the unsettling feeling that this might be _real_.

She knows she’s not in Fire Country, there are still trees that are alive here for a start, but she’s not entirely sure where she is, since she definitely didn’t know anywhere still had trees like this that _weren’t_ ash, and she’s trying to decide if she should try to find Konoha or maybe Suna — if she’s alive then Gaara should be able to explain what’s going on, and if she’s not the dead from Suna are going to be easier for her to face then all of Konoha — when movement nearby catches her attention.

It’s easy to shift silently through the trees until — _oh_. There are Sound ninja walking silently, but not quickly, through the trees. How are there still Sound ninja? Hadn’t they all died off well before…Sakura narrows her eyes and shifts to a tree in their path.

The group of Sound ninja, with a squirming Sasuke bound and gagged in their grasp, passes directly under the tree she’s waiting on, and she has a moment to think that Sasuke looks _smaller_ then she remembers, but then she doesn’t have time to think about much at all as she’s dodging kunai and crushing bodies and — it feels good. She thinks some of them might be skilled — but she’s been fighting impossible odds for the past two years and also she’s _dead_ , and they clearly weren’t expecting _her_ , so even when one stabs her through the stomach it doesn’t slow her down enough to give any of them the chance to survive.

She takes a moment, once all the enemies are dead, to stand there and pant and feel really good about it all, to feel oddly _alive_ , one hand absently knitting stomach tissue together — she hadn’t realized how much regret she still had about letting Sasuke even go to Orochimaru in the first place, and she thinks that this must be some post-death-undo-regrets thing and she is _here_ for it.

Except while she’s taking her moment, Sasuke has managed to tug the gag out of his mouth and he starts crying and —

Oh. Oh _no._

Sasuke _is_ smaller — because he’s younger and _not_ twelve younger but so much younger and — Sakura is not good with little kids but he’s crying and — “Shhh, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay!” Bedside manner was nothing Tsunade bothered to teach her because she certainly didn’t have one and she is _really_ not good with kids and — “All the bad guys are dead, I promise?” she tries, still hovering over him and not quite touching him and then he looks up at her with big dark eyes that are still filled with tears and _throws_ himself at her and —

Well, now they’re both covered in blood.

And then, as if this isn’t enough, one of the packs the enemy had been wearing starts to wiggle and another kid rolls out of it, bound and gagged. And she’d recognize him anywhere — but that doesn’t make her panic any less.

Sakura only considers making a break for it for a half second, as a tiny Sasuke sobs against her and a tiny Naruto wiggles himself out of his bonds.

***

Sakura does not understand what is happening — she doesn’t understand why she’s got both pint-sized Sasuke and a mini-Naruto clinging to her, and she doesn’t understand how she’s alive — but at least no one is crying anymore and they’re all clean now.

Admittedly, the process to getting there made her want to cry, but — But the important part is that they got there, and were all dressed. Mostly.

Sasuke is wearing her extra shirt — and it goes all the way to his _shins_ — as his clothes dry, and Naruto is in her extra shorts as his dry, because she only has two spare outfits in her pack and she also can’t be wearing her bloody things without upsetting them more.

Sasuke is eating a ration bar which is — she’s pretty positive he’s too young to be living off of ration bars alone but he hadn’t been willing to eat raw fish, even though she swore she killed all the parasites, and she’d never really gotten around to learning to cook — who had the time? Naruto, bless his little heart, was happily eating raw fish with her — even if he did keep asking about ramen. Come to think of it, it was possible a diet of just raw fish wasn’t any better than a diet of just ration bars…

It would be fine. They couldn’t be that far from Konoha, after all. They probably wouldn’t develop scurvy or something before she got them back.

…Right?

***

Hound corners him after his debriefing but before he’s even changed out of his armor. The obvious conclusion is that Hound is going to give him another mission, and Itachi only has a moment to decide if he’d rather let Hound down or the medic who just ordered him not to exert himself for a week to give his stab wound time to heal, before Hound speaks.

“Sasuke is safe,” he says, and Itachi feels ice in his veins. There’s no reason his five year old brother shouldn’t be safe, so the fact that it needs said is — “He was taken, almost two weeks ago,” Hound continues on, and Itachi wants nothing more than to rush home and confirm Sasuke’s safety for himself, but he also needs to know as much as he can so he knows who to kill. “My team was sent to retrieve him.”

Itachi lets out a breath and feels some of the ice melt. For all that he and Hound aren’t friends — for all that most of his clan hates Hound — he knows that he is one of the best trackers and wouldn’t lie to Itachi about Sasuke’s wellbeing. “Thank you,” he says, and if Hound is surprised by the amount of emotion in the two words the ceramic mask doesn’t show it.

“We didn’t find him,” he continues, voice flat. “We tracked the team that took him just past the edge of Fire, and found all twelve of them there. Dead. Buried.”

Itachi tries to remember how to breathe. If his brother…

“We couldn’t find any trail from there. Tried for a few days. By the time we got back he’d already been returned and his _rescuer_ was locked up.” Hound sounds annoyed, now, and if Itachi isn’t frantic with worry he’d probably think it’s funny that the Hound hadn’t been able to track someone but —

“Who brought him back?” he asks, instead, because he needs to have all of the information he can, even as he itches to get home and confirm his brother’s safety for himself.

Hound shrugs though, turning away and running a hand through his spiked grey hair. “Some missing-nin, I’ve never seen them in a Bingo book, but at least five of the twelve were jounin, so they weren’t fucking around.”

With no more information to be had immediately, and the knowledge that he can probably find Hound if he needs to, later, Itachi strips into his jounin-blues and shushins to the compound.

***

Sasuke _is_ unharmed, and seems mostly unaffected by his capture -- although the rest of the Uchiha certainly aren’t.

He wasn’t, apparently, the only one taken, but the other child was taken without any death, since no one had been watching _him._ The delay in going after them was apparently that no one reported the one missing, and the clan had originally believed Sasuke was dead, since Sayori Uchiha, Sasuke’s babysitter for the day, died messily, torn into so many pieces she was impossible to put back together again for the funeral. Which had led them to think Sasuke’s body had been torn up among all of the…mess…but…

But they’d been wrong.

And Sasuke is unharmed, if very enthusiastic about “Sak’ra” who, he claims, had saved him and also is the coolest and strongest and _best_.

Much to the displeasure of their father, who would rather Sasuke forget his new ‘best friend’.

***

Sakura is fairly confident she recognizes the ANBU who are guarding her in the cell.

She definitely recognizes the cell.

It’s a little different from this angle though, being on the inside and not the outside, and a whole lot colder. She considers the length of chain on the restraints — chakra blocking, naturally — that have been put on her and then starts to carefully pace the confines to keep warm for the moment while she thinks.

It’s one of the nicer cells, as these things go. Which probably means they want something from her before they kill her or imprison her for the rest of her probably short life.

She tips her head back to consider the arch of the ceiling. They’d redesigned it, after finding some design flaws, just a year before everything went to shit, but this one hasn’t been redesigned yet.

Yeah, she can definitely break out of here but —

Her lips twist and she glances back towards where the ANBU guards are stationed behind their genjutsu.

She’s almost completely sure that one of them is Kakashi-sensei. And her breaking out is going to cause a lot of loose rubble and — of course she’s sure he would be able to get out of the way and not get hurt but.

But what if she’s wrong?

She doesn’t know what the hell is going on and she’s definitely not going to risk his life to save her own, even if it ends with her death.

She’s died before, she can do it again.

Ideally she won’t be dying but, well, the final war kind of took her ability to be optimistic away from her. That was always more Naruto’s job anyways.

She sits down and starts to carefully circulate her chakra around the bands on her wrists and ankles. They’re some of the better chains, which means they self regulate to take 95% of the prisoner’s chakra at all times. Which means, of course, that if one has very, very good chakra control they can be bypassed.

It’s a good exercise, in any case, especially as she’s not sure how long she’s going to be here and her chakra has been feeling weird since she woke up.

So she closes her eyes and circulates her chakra and lets it keep her warm.

It doesn’t take long to do, unfortunately, and then she’s left with the urge to break down walls and boredom pressing in on her.

***

He’s not sure what he’s expecting. From the stories that Sasuke has been telling he thinks he was expecting someone rough and hard and battle scarred and old not...not a pink girl, maybe a year or two older than him, who seems fairly unbothered by the cell she’s been put in.

Which is impressive, since the cell has clearly been designed to discomfort. The chakra-shackles she’s chained with are almost comically large on her, and it’s a testament to her skill as a shinobi that they don’t hinder her as she eats what has been brought to her.

He came in on the heels of the chunin who brought her meal, and has remained hidden so as to better observe her. It’s ten in the morning, and she’s been brought something that could best be categorized as dinner — but then in the windowless cell there’s no way for her to tell. Disturbing a prisoner’s sense of time was a classic, after all, he can’t be surprised they’re utilizing it here.

The meal is a stew, bread and water. He knowns it is likely stringy, stale and bland — but they aren’t trying to weaken her, which likely means they’re still hoping to get more answers from her. Of course, they have also cast a genjutsu on the meal, making it look like rot, maggots, and weevils are present where they are not.

She should, he thinks, be able to sense it and dispel it, even with her chakra limited by her chains.

It’s the kind of thing that would catch a fresh genin, or an academy student. Anyone with the skills to take down a twelve man cell should be able to dispel such a light genjutsu.

But she doesn’t. It’s impossible to tell, of course, if that means she’s unaware it’s a genjutsu or simply ignoring it. He doesn’t know if that means that she wasn’t the one to take down the men, or if she’s weak in genjutsu, or if there’s some other reason for her to leave it. But he thinks it’s only ANBU training that keeps one of the guards from retching when she seems to cheerfully pick the maggots out of the meat and then eat them with obvious delight.

“I’ve been told those cause disease,” is what he finds himself saying, voice flat, when she crunches through another like it’s a delicacy -- and somehow it doesn’t matter that he knows it’s _not_ there, it’s still very disturbing to watch.

“It’s mechanical transmission,” she says, taking a dainty bite of the stew itself this time, “not the maggots themselves. So they don’t cause diseases, they just _can_ carry them. Though mostly it’s going to be a bacterial agent. Which is to say, anything I’m going to get from them I’m going to get from the stew itself. Properly cleaned, however, they are a solid source of protein.” She smiles, then, and looks up at him. A brow arches and somehow her eyes never quite meet his as she adds a belated, “Uchiha-san.”

He observes her again, now that she can see him. She takes the moment to look him over — and then her eyes are back on his face but still not quite meeting his eyes, even as he shifts.

As the silence drags on she blinks, then laughs under her breath. “If you’ll excuse me, Uchiha-san, I’m going to continue eating. I would offer you some, but I have no idea how advanced the medical care is in this village right now and wouldn’t want to be accused of an assassination attempt on top of my crime of returning children.”

But despite her words she waits until he inclines his head slightly before she returns to her food. Now she’s eating with purpose, instead of to seemingly enjoy the delicacies. He wonders if she expects him to take her food away.

She finishes quickly, mopping up the last of her stew with the bread and popping it into her mouth with just as much enjoyment as she displayed with the maggots. “Thank you for your patience, Uchiha-san. Now, can I help you with something?”

He tilts his head and considers her for a long moment.

***

“Will you do me a favor, Uchiha-san?” she asks right before he’s about to depart, and he wonders if this is what she’s been considering since he first saw the twitch of her lips. (He also wonders how she knows he was going to go, or if that’s incidental. And if she knows he has no intention of coming back.)

She might only know him from stories his brother has told, but she knows he’s a ninja and he can’t imagine she expects him to agree blindly -- or not to lie about it in any case. He does her the courtesy of not lying. “You can ask.”

She smiles and meets his eyes for the first time since he’s observed her. “If they decide to make my execution public, can you try to keep Sasuke-kun and Naruto-kun from seeing it?”

He chews over her words for a moment, and she doesn’t seem to feel the need to rush him. But then, with her life being stuck here he’s not sure she feels the need to rush much at all currently. “You seem certain you will be executed,” he finally decides on, not making it a question.

Her smile goes from sweet to wry and she arches an eyebrow. Which, he supposes, is answer enough.

“Most, in your situation, expecting execution, would be trying to escape,” he points out, mildly, with the intention of finishing with ‘or strike a deal’, but her snort makes him pause.

Her gaze finally leaves his, and she looks pointedly around the room -- pinpointing exactly where the ANBU are located as well as the secret door and what he knows to be the few weak points in the building before finally looking back at him. The ANBU stiffen and her lips twitch. “If I chose to escape the damage would be hard to contain, and citizens -- civilians and shinobi alike -- would be injured.” She shrugs and raises her hands as if to demonstrate that she’s harmless, though given the weight of the cuffs and her ability to move in them it does the opposite. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Her hands drop and the cuffs crack against the stone. “Not anyone in Konoha, in any case, I don’t think.”

Itachi tries to ignore the signs the ANBU agents are sending back and forth, but then they’re signing to him. He doesn’t respond more than a twitch of his shoulders, and he’s never been part of T&I, but she does seem willing to talk to him, so he supposes he’ll get what he can from her. “Who do you want to hurt?” he asks, because it seems like the logical question.

“Oh, hm,” she sits back on her heels a bit and uses a hand to brush her hair behind an ear like it’s not weighted down at all. “Right now? Probably Orochimaru, so he doesn’t try to kidnap Sasuke again. But I guess I could go after all of Sound…” she taps her chin in thought and Itachi wonders about the ice that’s sliding down his spine.

“Orochimaru?” he asks, because he hadn’t realized but he should have and --

She freezes and glances at the ANBU like she expects some sort of support from them. Even though they’re still hidden and she shouldn’t be seeing them anyways.

“Why,” he asks, voice low and soft and deadly, “do you think Orochimaru is involved with Sound?”

“Erm,” she fidgets with the chain partially curled in her lap and she looks young in a way she hasn’t until then, and he wonders that he ever thought her a good liar. “Isn’t he the head of Sound? I swear someone told me that...but maybe not? Might’ve misunderstood! Er.”

“How long were you following them?” he asks, leaning forward until he’s almost touching the bars.

“I wasn’t,” she says, promptly, and even though her eyes dart away from him and back to the ANBU for support -- what support could she possibly expect from them he doesn’t know -- he believes her. “I was just resting and then they were there.” He believes this too, but then her tongue trips and she scratches at her cheek again and he wonders why no one had bothered to teach her to hide her tells. “I don’t like when people threaten kids, so I rescued them.”

His eyes narrow further. “So you took on twelve shinobi of unknown skill because you saw two children were captured.”

“Oh, er, I only saw Sasuke at first. Naruto-kun was in a bag and I didn’t realize he was, you know, a kid until after.” He believes this too.

“And yet,” he continues, and he shouldn’t enjoy the shiver he sees go through her at his voice but he does, “the only people you want to hurt are the ones who took my little brother, because you think they’ll try it again.”

“Ah,” she says, and purses her lips and considers the ceiling. And he knows she’s going to lie before she’s opened her mouth, smile false and bright and wrong. “Guess I laid it on a bit thick, huh?”

He stays, staring her down for a long moment before easing back and -- her hand flashes out and catches his wrist before he can fully settle back. The bars stop her from going further, the shackles locking her there, but her eyes are intense when they meet his and she repeats her earlier plea. “Don’t let them make Sasuke or Naruto watch, if I’m to die in public.”

“You think they even think of you anymore?” he asks, as if Sasuke hadn’t been bringing up ‘Sak’ra’ every other breath.

Her grimace tells him more than she probably means it to, as does the shadow in her eyes. And yet she doesn’t release him. “No,” she says flatly, and he believes this too, even if she’s wrong, “but I think they’ll recognize me when I’m dying and I don’t think it will do either of them any good. Let the first death they see not be someone who rescued them. Don’t do that to them. Not yet.”

He considers and then offers a short nod. “I will do what I can,” he promises, finally, and her grip relaxes and her hands return to her lap and she smiles at him with such relief and he’s leaving before she can ask him anything else or he can do anything foolish.

***

One of her guards is definitely Kakashi-sensei and she’s pretty sure one of the other ones is Genma. She scratches at her cheek idly as she considers. Theoretically she knows how old every one of them is, since she handles their medical checkups. Or she did, back when they still had medical checkups and before the final war and the end of her world. Practically she relies on the paper and then promptly forgets. She’s pretty sure Genma is older than Kakashi.

Probably.

She tries to consider just how old Kakashi might be, right now. If Sasuke and Naruto are five...and he was in his twenties (early twenties? middle twenties? She’s pretty sure it wasn’t late twenties...) when he was teaching them and they were twelve…

Sakura tries to count years on her fingers. Since she’s not sure just where in his twenties he was, she’s not entirely sure how old he should be -- but she’s thinking somewhere between fifteen and twenty. And since she hasn’t seen him without his ANBU mask -- though the shock of hair is unmistakable — and even if it wasn’t that slouch is fairly recognizable — she’ll have to settle for that.

Which is a bit odd, because that means he’s around her age.

She chews on a nail and considers if she knows how old she is, right now. Time had gotten a bit...questionable there at the end. Day and night blurring together and sleep snatched when it could be and food devoured as quickly as it could be found and --

She shakes off a shudder and decides, arbitrarily, that she probably has hit eighteen before she died. Just because something about dying at eighteen seems less awful than dying at seventeen -- and because she’s still pretty sure they’re going to execute her here and yes. She’s eighteen, she’s almost fifty percent sure.

Her gaze wanders around the rest of her cell and she wonders if she could’ve avoided all of this. Maybe if she’d been carrying a Konoha headband, instead of the Shinobi one they’d all donned for unity. But that, she thinks, would’ve probably landed her straight in T&I instead of in this nice cushy cell.

Not, she thinks, that they won’t take her to T&I eventually. In fact, they’ve probably left her here to soften her up for the inevitable interrogation but...after living on the run for so long it’s rather like a vacation instead of punishment. She stands up and starts to go through a slow kata, minimizing her chakra until she can feel the weight of the cuffs on her ankles and wrists.

She thinks it might be night time, for all that she was recently brought ‘lunch’, but she doesn’t relish the thought of sleep yet and her shackles let her move enough to do this, so she will and see if the physical exertion helps her grab a minute or seven of peaceful rest.

She’s not going to hold her breath on that, though.

***

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Inoichi says, later, downing pain relievers and squinting over a cup of water at Ibiki. “She’s very polite,” he adds, after a moment, “when she kicks me out of her head, but I can’t get anything.”

Shisui is staring through the one way mirror at where Sakura is sitting calmly, her eyes closed and her posture relaxed.

Itachi chooses not to interpret the expression on his face, instead turning towards Ibiki. “You have not yet explained why you required our presence. Neither of us have passed torture and interrogation training.” Or, at least, not officially.

Ibiki snorts. “I was told she was quite chatty with _you_.”

Shisui glances at him, but he simply waits to see what Ibiki will say next, and he stays unruffled as the silence stretches between them.

Naturally, Shisui loses his patience first. “So if Itachi is here to chat, why am I here?”

Ibiki’s smile is the stuff of nightmares, and Itachi knows he’s going to dislike the answer before it even comes.

***

Sakura’s head is pounding.

Ino had run her through her paces for the Yamanaka clan jutsu, but she hadn’t had to use the skill since then, it had simply been preparatory, and she’s terrified of hurting Inoichi. Plus her chakra has been kind of weird since she did the whole dying and appearing in a different time, or universe, or reality, or purgatory, or whatever, thing.

Most notably, she’s realized the seal on her forehead isn’t there -- or rather, it isn’t there visibly, but she can still feel it. She’s not sure what that means and being locked up in a cell hasn’t given her much time to work on it, just lots of time to think about it and come to exactly zero conclusions.

They’re actually being pretty nice to her, as these things go. Or she thinks they are. She knows that T&I got a bit...different right before the war, with more allowances made and maybe that’s what she’s thinking of. It’s not like she spent much time with T&I before everything went to hell in any case. 

Or, well, there was the time she was healing for them but -- but after effects of torture don’t quite tell the whole story, do they?

Maybe, she thinks, they believe that she _was_ just trying to rescue mini-Sasuke and mini-Naruto and doesn’t mean the village any harm.

She snorts at her own thoughts and starts to consider if she can risk just a little healing to her head to minimize the headache when the door opens.

Her lips twitch at the sight of Itachi Uchiha -- he’s still older than she thinks he should be, close to her age or maybe a little older, but then she’s going off the age that someone told her he was when he died and vague memories, and it’s not like she had much of a chance to find out -- before someone enters behind him and --

The killing intent she can’t stop, it’s as instinctive as the hair-thin chakra that slices through the shackles on her wrists and ankles so that she can move in an instant to kill-escape-rescue-run.

Orochimaru’s eyes widen at the spike which is _wrong_ and -- and she realizes that he’s not moving right, gait too stiff and -- her gaze goes back to Itachi for a moment and she offers him a nod and a greeting even as she keeps her hands in her lap so as not to reveal the fact that her constraints have been broken and are no longer functioning. It’s easy to mask her chakra down to nothing as she waits.

She should’ve been expecting something like this -- maybe not Orochimaru -- but something since she’d kept throwing Inoichi out of her head. But she’d thought physical torture would be the next step -- and she hadn’t wanted to think about that much. Would having lived through what she’d lived through -- and died by -- change how she responded to torture? Would it be worse, to feel like she was dying without actually dying, or would the knowledge of what death felt like and what being bisected felt like, for real, make the torture seem less? 

Reality is tricky, and she’s still not sure she’s not in some elaborate genjutsu. Maybe Kakashi, or less likely Sasuke, had found her right before she’d died and given her a vision with their sharingan, even as she died. A few seconds could be stretched to a whole lifetime that way. 

If they did then they sucked at choosing what to show her and she is going to have words with them. 

Later. 

Once she dies for real. (Because she knows what her injuries were — are? — and she’s not coming back from that.)

But for now she has to deal with this.

Sakura decides to ignore whoever is pretending to be Orochimaru, for now, and focus on Itachi. “It’s to be sharingan torture then?” she asks, lightly, and fights down the urge to fidget as it might reveal her lack of restraint.

“Itachi-kun told me that you think I took Sasuke,” the fake Orochimaru hisses -- and she thinks if she didn’t know him -- didn’t still have nightmares about him despite all the other horrors she’s seen -- it would’ve been convincing.

But it’s not.

Oh, but maybe she should pretend that it is.

She can’t keep her brow from furrowing in thought and she’s reminded of the fact that she’s really not good at subterfuge.

Team 7 had always been more about blasting through problems, rather than sneaking around them. Much to the consternation of, well, everyone else.

“Ah,” she hedges, shrugging lightly and tangling her fingers together so she doesn’t move her hands, “well, I was told you were in charge of Sound, and since it was Sound ninja who I found him with it seemed like a safe bet.” She does her best to smile at him.

Maybe she was wrong -- maybe this is an Orochimaru from this universe-time-reality and something else is going on. She really doesn’t remember Sasuke getting kidnapped by Sound at five -- she didn’t think Sound even _existed_ when they were five. But then, that was before she’d joined the Academy, before she’d even known about Sasuke and it’s not like she’d ever been his confidant. She snorts to herself at the thought.

“You seem unconcerned with the thought of sharingan torture,” Itachi remarks as he carefully takes the chair across from her.

It looks leagues more comfortable than her own and she tries not to let that distract her.

She’s been having trouble focusing.

Maybe because none of this seems real.

She _died_ and now she’s _here_.

It had been easy to be present when mini-Sasuke and mini-Naruto had been relying on her but now...now she’s not sure she cares. And maybe it had been the cell — she’d suspected it was to soften her up and maybe it worked.

Mostly she’s just tired.

It’s not like any of them can hurt the people she cares about, she left them alone when she died.

“Ah,” she says, and offers a minimal shrug, “I’ve decided to go with bravado as my persona for this part of the program, I suppose, and I’m less worried about hurting you than I was about hurting Inoichi, so that’ll be nice.”

The Orochimaru-mimic hisses -- and Sakura is fairly sure he’s having a good time now, swanning around behind Itachi and hissing. It does look like fun, actually. She offers him a smile and he flicks his tongue at her -- snake-like but not near long enough and not the right shade of purple. She resists the urge to laugh at him.

The devil is in the details.

“Besides,” she says, after enough time has passed that it’s clear Itachi is waiting for something, “it’ll be interesting to see how you show me my death.” His eyes narrow, she can see by the tightening of the skin at his temples, and she wonders if he has realized she’s laughing at him. How can death scare her when it’s already happened?

“And,” she offers, resisting the urge to tap her chin because she can’t keep the shackles on if she moves her hand, “maybe it’ll convince you all that I don’t have whatever answers you’re looking for, since I’ve already told you everything I know and I’m sure you’ve already found where I left the bodies of the assholes who took the kids.” 

The fake Orochimaru swans closer, and Sakura decides it’s definitely not Orochimaru -- she might not be a chakra sensor, but he’s pouring his out and even she can see it’s not right. “We need answers,” he says, looming over the table at her and blocking her view of Itachi. She wonders if they’re trying to set it up so Itachi can catch her eyes easier, once he steps away. That would be clever and she’s prepared to be impressed. “Because they’ve taken Sasuke again-”

“What!” She demands with her hand wrapped in the collar of his tunic, having dragged him the rest of the way across the table so she can snarl in his face. “How could you let this happen! You --” abruptly she realizes she’s the idiot here, even as the Orochimaru-wannabe is starting to turn slightly red from lack of air.

Itachi wouldn’t be here, sitting calmly, if his brother had been taken. Or, wouldn’t have been sitting there calmly, since he’s not now, because she just lunged across the table and her chakra restraints are on the floor around her.

“Ah,” she says, and releases the ninja whose henge has started to drop anyways due to oxygen deprivation. She eases back carefully, giving Ibiki warning so he doesn’t accidentally cut her throat more than he already has with the blade he has against her jugular. “Whoops,” she offers, as she sits back down and raises her hands up in the air to prove she’s unarmed. Of course, this mostly just further demonstrates that her restraints aren’t holding her in place at all and have actually fallen to the ground at some point.

She itches idly at her cheek as she eyes the four men who all have weapons drawn on her now. The Orochimaru is, in fact, an Uchiha who she doesn’t recognize, which really isn’t saying much since she pretty much only knows what Sasuke, Itachi, Obito, and Madara look like, and even though he’s rubbing his throat he’s got a kunai pointed her way. Good for him.

“Sorry about that,” she says, trying to relax back into the most uncomfortable chair in existence. She idly wipes the cut away from her skin and the blood with it, which seems to only alarm them more.

But none of them are _saying_ anything and -- and she’s _sure_ that Itachi wouldn’t be here if he was but -- “Sasuke is okay, right? Him and Naruto?”

Itachi, at least, relaxes at her question and offers her a nod and a hum as he sheaths his blade.

  
Well, that’s a relief at least.

***

The Hokage stares at the smoke from his pipe as Itachi’s mind whirls.

He’s only here as his father’s shadow, and it’s not his place to speak but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to. The Hokage meets his gaze for a brief moment and Itachi fights not to let the relief he feels show as Danzo finishes his speech.

“And so, I think it’s clear that this isn’t a _village_ issue, but rather a _clan_ issue. And as such I move that the captive be put into the care of the Uchiha clan, and made their responsibility to do with as they see fit.”

Fugaku argues, as Itachi knew he would, but when it comes to a vote he is overruled.

His father keeps his temper until they are within the compound. “How dare they! They think we won’t do what’s necessary, simply because this missing nin saved one of our children? We’ll do a public execution!” 

“Father,” Itachi interrupts, glad to see there aren’t many ears around to hear this rant, “I think that is what the councilman wants us to do.” 

Fugaku snarls, and Itachi picks up his steps to return to the main house peaceably. His father follows, after a moment, quickly overtaking him. Itachi allows himself a smile for a brief moment before wiping it away. 

“You’ve met the criminal, haven’t you.” He states as they take their shoes off at the entrance. “Tell me about them.” 

Itachi calls out a greeting, as is only polite, and is pleased when he hears his mother’s voice, he follows it into one of the common areas and smiles to see her with fresh tea.

“She is...powerful. But doesn’t look it.” Itachi gratefully accepts the tea his mother pours as he settles at the table. 

His father hums and settles down as well. 

“If we were to execute her,” Itachi continues after a long moment, “I suspect it would make us look unreasonable and cruel. I am unsure of her age, she might be anywhere from fifteen to thirty, but she seems young...and she is likely to incite sympathy in onlookers.” 

“A private execution, then?” his father muses, and Itachi swallows down more tea to stop himself from responding immediately. But his father can still read him somewhat, and he chuckles and arches an eyebrow. “You don’t think we should execute her.”

“No,” Itachi grants, carefully placing his cup down and folding his hands in his lap. “I think that the council proposed we take her to prove that we are prone to rash decisions and harsh punishments. I think, if possible, it would be far better to take her in and rehabilitate her into being a useful member of the village.” 

Fugaku downs his tea while he thinks, and as he places it down with a click, Mikoto is there and pouring more. She winks at Itachi behind her husband’s back, and he feels some of the tension ease out of his shoulders with his mother’s approval. 

“You think that is possible -- and worthwhile?” he asks, finally, and Itachi can only nod. 

As a few minutes pass, Itachi realizes that his father is not convinced, and so he voices a few more thoughts. “I suspect she’s been led to believe she will be killed for the crime of rescuing Sasuke -- it would not be hard to let her believe that she has been spared by your request, father, and that would earn you a start of her loyalty.” 

This, Itachi can tell, is more convincing. 

“Besides,” he adds, belatedly, lying with pieces of the truth, “she’s a healer, she probably wouldn’t last much longer as a missing nin.”

***

Itachi is very serious when he fits the chakra blocking bracelets to her wrists and takes the shackles off. He does it carefully too, one shackle off and one bracelet on. She balks a little when he kneels but -- right, ankle cuffs, that totally makes sense.

The curly haired Uchiha snickers as she looks fixedly up at the sky, and she wonders why he isn’t saying anything about the restraints. The bracelets are pretty enough -- with Uchiha fans stamped in them, naturally -- and certainly strong, but not stronger than the shackles and he saw her break out of those easily enough.

For that matter, so did Itachi, and yet he’s treating this like it would restrain her at all.

Look underneath the underneath, she reminds herself, and considers just how much of her chakra she now has access to, as these are smaller than the shackles and lighter, and what purpose he could have for visibly restraining her without actually doing so.

“The Uchiha have been officially put in charge of your continued holding and care,” he says, once he’s back on his feet and facing her, “since you are here due to your involvement with Sasuke.”

“And Naruto,” she corrects, absently, as she flexes her fingers and changes the flow of her chakra. It takes her a moment to consider the angles of his words before looking at him sharply, “Who have the Uchiha pissed off, to be given such a task?”

He smiles, which is, quite frankly, unreasonably pretty and Sakura wonders just how many fangirls he had before he defected -- or, perhaps, how many he currently has here. “Danzo,” he says.

It’s only because he’s not directly in front of her that she’s able to stop herself from snapping these cuffs as well. How could she have forgotten Danzo? There’s pounding in her ears and her eyes won’t focus and she feels like someone has wrapped her entire body in thick wool and then hit her with a sledgehammer. “Fuck,” she breathes with feeling, “fucking Danzo.”

“Oh good,” she hears muffled through the rushing noise and she tries to get her eyes to focus on Itachi because he’s closer than he was and his grin has gotten sharper and that makes her heart pound and clears up some of the fog, “you’ve heard of him.”

“He needs to die,” she says, instinctively, and it’s only once the words are out that it occurs to her that she probably shouldn’t be saying things like that when she’s a prisoner who just got released from her cell.

But Itachi just stares at her, smile still in place, while his curly haired friend laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> A few things: Obviously from the summary you can see that Sakura dies in her universe before showing up here. 
> 
> She comes from a version of canon where things went worse then in canon, with them devolving into a whole 'Final War' that is...going poorly for anyone human. You may also notice that the universe now doesn't appear to be canon either, and you would be right. Sakura's under the impression that she might be back in time, but it's more like back in time in a totally different universe. 
> 
> Please let me know if you think I should tag for anything I didn't tag for!
> 
> Per usual, if you wanna ask me questions or bug me plz come find me on [on my writing tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/capriciouswrites).
> 
> We're in for a long haul of fictober ya'll. 
> 
> Please let me know what you think! 
> 
> Hope everyone is having a day.


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